


Inexplicable

by hologramblue



Category: Shin Megami Tensei Series, 真女神転生IV FINAL | Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
Genre: M/M, Mild Gore, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-22 10:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8282041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hologramblue/pseuds/hologramblue
Summary: Assorted Nanalujah shortfics/imagery/character study things/????s based on a list of "23 Emotions People Feel But Can't Explain".2 - énouement - "The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self."





	1. rubatosis

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on, like, two-point-thirty-five Nanalujah fics over the past week or so, but they keep overlapping and meandering because I have the attention span of a fruit fly and am so used to writing for RP that I get bound up in describing reactions and not moving the action along. They're still going to _happen_ if I have anything to say about it, but in the meantime I need to eject some ideas so they don't end up shoved sideways into fics they don't quite fit into.
> 
> This list of neat words (http://introvertunites.tumblr.com/post/146140953040) crossed my dashboard and it was just begging to be used as a fic prompt list.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **This chapter has spoilers up to/through the route split. Warning: gore, I think?**

\---

_**rubatosis** , n. - the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat_

\---

Nanashi hits the ground in slow motion, hiccuping blood onto the flesh floor of the Egg.

Time stops, Hallelujah imagines, not just for him but for every sharp intake of breath he hears, and then it comes roaring back, kicking terror into protective fury into stark resolve because together they _will not_ lose another of their own. He hears Gaston swear and practically feels the indignation rolling off of him, just as the sound of a shotgun being cocked echoes around and, with a noise that seems louder than it ever could be, Nozomi opens fire on the god before them.

He's moving before another thought can form, Toki too, both of them diving to catch Leader before he keels forward completely. Danu's voice rings out clear, _Give me time, I have a plan,_ but Dagda's fury burns even under heavy gunfire and Nanashi convulses in their grip with an awful wet sound and Hallelujah wants to know where they're going to get something as scarce as that.

"Leader," he near-whispers, hushed by urgency, at the same time that Toki breathes _"Master"_ \- he reaches up with his other hand, sweeps Nanashi's hair out of his face for lack of anything else to do and wishes instantly he hadn't. There's blood on his lips and his chin. The green in his eyes is sputtering like a dying flame. If he sees them, or Dagda, it's by a miracle, because his whole expression is taken up by pain, and Hallelujah feels more helplessness than he's ever carried dig into him for seeing it.

Nanashi's arm stutters up off the ground, hand splaying against his own chest. The cool light of a Diarama ripples up to his shoulder, through Hallelujah's clutching fingertips, illuminating Toki's stricken face, making him cough and gasp on whatever broken thing it mended inside him. Far away, the gunshots stop; there's yelling, in one voice and then in three, _look out you two look out HE'S COMING YOUR WAY_ , and then Toki turns her head and hisses something _vicious_ and Hallelujah looks up straight into Dagda's eyes, the god looming, crackling light swirling in his outstretched hand.

He yells for Chiro and flings an arm up, and magic with it. The Megidolaons collide and Dagda's surges through to crash against the fox's ward. Hallelujah flinches from the searing that drops through him anyways, the not-quite-fire sting of raw magic sparking through his bones when the attack lands, but gathers himself and _shoves_ another spell towards Dagda's sneering face.

His heart does a tiny leap of desperate pride when the god loses his footing for just a moment, stumbling back half a step from the force of the attack. Dagda steadies as if to strike again, sneering, but just then has to turn, because Gaston yells something haughty and wrathful from behind - the spearman lunges, and drives Gungnir's point into a joint in his armor. He looks more irritated than wounded, reaching with one hand for the spear's shaft to push it and its wielder away. Gaston braces himself with a scoff - Isabeau dashes past him, lightning crackling from her hand and down her blade.

Nanashi coughs again, sounding drier. Hallelujah looks back down to see Toki pressing life stones into his hands, wrapping his stiff and bloody fingers around them so they glow and melt into his palm. He shivers steadily against Hallelujah's side.

"We need to," his voice wheezes and wavers and catches on blood like a ghoul's shambling gait, "Dagda - kill. Him. It's him or you." Hallelujah gets what he's saying, that there's only two ways this fight will end, so instead of letting him keep talking until it shreds his throat he gets his arm around Leader's back and squeezes, just a little, just to make sure Nanashi knows they're _there_ without having to lift his head.

Leader makes a noise that might be a laugh. The shivers grow stronger.

"Danu has a plan," Hallelujah tells him, voice low and trembling a little despite his efforts. "Just tough it out a little longer, we'll get you out of this mess." The life stones seem to be working, maybe - Nanashi is still shaking, with pain or weakness or both, but he's lucid and struggling. He summons Fenrir, and gets his head up to glare at the demon wolf when it snarls disobediently. Whatever negotiation flashes between them ends with Fenrir dashing forward, however reluctantly, to box Dagda in against their allies.

There's a flash of teeth, wet and red but still grinning weakly. Nanashi catches Toki's hand as she passes him a life stone, and reaches across himself to grab Hallelujah's fingers. "Okay." He sways and he looks so tired and wounded but he's hanging on, and they're hanging onto him, and he'll come out the other end of this alive. They offer each other unsteady smiles, and count down the heartbeats until Danu's reprieve.

And then, Dagda _laughs_ , derisive and cruel.

"Is that _it?_ " he jeers. Cold sweeps over Hallelujah, shattering his relief and planting dread in its place. How is it fair, that he can sound so unconcerned while the rest of them are fighting so hard, when Nanashi dropping out of his own body would leave one more hole in a world that's already seen so much grief? "You make a lot of noise for a crowd who just lies down and _hugs it out_ at the last moment." He doesn't even turn to face Nanashi - just makes a severing motion with his free hand. Fenrir vanishes into smoke and electricity. "Give it a _rest_."

The change is so, so subtle for what it is. There's no convulsion, no gasp, no spitting blood. Nanashi just - _slumps_ , boneless in Hallelujah's grip. Toki's hand flies to his neck. "He's still alive," she announces, voice strained and face doing something Hallelujah's never seen it manage before.

His face, too, is probably - if he could see it -

Because _still alive_ is _soon dead_ , and already blood is seeping through Nanashi's jumpsuit, wounds unspooling where Dagda had raveled him back together before. He's deadweight that Hallelujah pulls back into his arms, letting his head loll back onto his shoulder so Toki can keep emptying her pockets of healing trinkets and pressing scraps of life into a fading corpse.

It's like trying to fix a crumbling bridge with a handful of pebbles.

A single sign of Nanashi's consciousness comes in the flick of his gaze down, forward, to where Gaston and Nozomi and Isabeau weather Dagda's onslaught, Navarre's presence flitting about their heads. Hallelujah seizes onto that. The familiar pang of worry in his chest unfolds beyond itself, into something bleak and gnawing and yearning to comfort and make right. He finds himself whispering meaningless things on instinct alone, little rapid-fire _you'll be okay we've got your back just hang on a few more seconds just a few more seconds_ uncertainties that do nothing to reassure anyone. A few seconds is all he can imagine them having, before he'll be gone for good, so _hurry, Danu-_

Could he return as a ghost, like Navarre? Or could Danu bring him back, once Dagda relinquished his grip? The thoughts grow wilder and smaller and more aching with each instant that slips past. Hallelujah hears his pulse in his ears and can't find one in Nanashi's wrist, and a pathetic vision comes and goes, of letting Leader use his heartbeat, tying him to it like a ferry to a post on the shore. He's half demon, isn't he? Shouldn't something like that be possible? What good is being half demon if you can't work a miracle when you need one most?

"Come on." The pain of new loss is an unsteady wall waiting to come crashing down. For all Hallelujah knows, he could be holding a dead body already. But Toki is watching, and she knows what death and life look like, so her pained silence is his hope. "Come on, Leader, you've got this..." If Nanashi goes - if that hope dies - Hallelujah will survive it, like he survived his mom and Abe. But - and, haha, this is _kind of terrifying_ \- they might not make it through Krishna without him, and the world ends, and that's that. And if they do win somehow, on a miracle - it'll hurt. He'll survive, they'll survive, but it'll hurt and it'll keep hurting every time they look around at the world after the war and think that Asahi and Nanashi should be there to see it with them.

"We -" His throat is dry. If Nanashi dies here, what will they regret not having said to him? "We care about you. You got that? You've done - so much." It's a fucking send-off. He's damning him to death with every word, but he thinks of warm, true, important things being left unsaid and it _scares him shitless_. Toki is staring at him, maybe in horror? Or maybe she gets it too. He can't tell. "Thank you. For everything. We'd be - missing so much, without you." Navarre, Gaston, Toki. Himself. Nanashi transformed him, turned a nervous, lonely sycophant into someone who could reject his own father and take the reins of the Ashura-kai.

He looks down. Nanashi's eyes are on him, unfocused. Panic rears suddenly, blocking out sound, like there's something he's missed, like he's failed to express just _how much_ they care, just _how much_ they'll miss him. The intensity is right there within reach, woven into his racing heartbeat, one more reason to want to transplant it instead of fumbling for too few words too late.

_Is that it-_

Toki gasps and lurches forward and whirls around.

_No-_

Light. Light from Danu, light from the new figure she's drawn from herself, light down Nanashi's arm and in his eyes when they snap open and his whole body jerks and the pain flies away and the space it leaves in Hallelujah's chest fills up with pride and hope and rage -

Leader breathes hard like he's been sprinting, feet scuffing at the ground like he's already trying to stand, and Hallelujah can't imagine not helping him to his feet, propping him up between himself and Toki so they can stare down Dagda's shock and anger. The pulse in his fingertips matches the one under them; life is relief and resolve and warmth in the arm slung over his shoulders when it pulls tight in wordless thanks.

They step forward, into battle once more, and this time Hallelujah loses nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Toki is just kind of.... _there_ and I do solemnly swear to make it up to her at some point, somehow.


	2. énouement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **For greatest effect,[the Hallelujah backstory thing from the materials book](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-oUJNNSjooj66GNHGNS9ozlmFyNOulemgLlQxBW9Czg/edit) is recommended reading. It has spoilers for the big Hallelujah thing.**
> 
>  
> 
> **Set some unspecified amount of time after the Peace/Bonds ending. Warning: SHORT 'N SCHMOOPY**

\---

_**énouement** , n. - the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self_

\---

When it's new and surprising and still feels like a dream, it's like fruit. It's like how, one day, the dust settled and the construction started and the hole in the sky casting down light didn't vanish, and the merchants that began to appear sold fresh bread and real meat and fruit whole from the tree; week by steady week all the rare things stopped being quite so rare, but the sweetness of the fruit had yet to change for it.

Nanashi throws his arm over his shoulders after a fight well won, then drops it to his waist, pulls him close, knocks their temples together and laughs.

They sit side by side in his room in Roppongi and talk over the day's work, then side by side turns into side-against-side, holding hands, then they keel over into sleep and when Hallelujah wakes up they're still on the couch, Nanashi snoring and using his chest as a pillow.

He finds ways for Nanashi to linger as long as he can, inventing reasons to show him new projects, tell him new anecdotes, explain the details of his work. And when there's no more time to stretch out of the day, they find a private and quiet place and become bashful and fumbling, daunted by the things they could admit, by things they have no script for expressing. He's the one to break the tension, remembering to trust himself with what's right; he draws Nanashi into a hug so they can let out their relieved sighs and laugh into each other's necks, joke freely about the future, bask in the intimacy of the motion. They kiss, remembering that they've slain a Creator with their convictions and deciding to let embarrassment lie just as dead, and the kiss is warm and human and feels perfectly, imperfectly mundane.

Phones blink and chime. There are promises to meet up again soon, conversations across distance, a chronicle of building familiarity.

It is precious and abundant at last, and he drinks it all down like sweet syrup from the can.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is garbage for interaction but for the love of god hmu @hologramblue anyways to swap ideas about this game and these characters and this ship


End file.
